This chapter considers how the zonbi has served twentieth-century Haitian writers as a valuable trope through which to account for and contest the horrors of everyday life under and in the wake of Duvalierism. The chapter examines the literary configuration of the zonbi from three distinct yet interrelated perspectives: as a figure of immanent and even imminent revolt; as a lens through which to reckon with gender in Haiti and beyond; and as a metaphor for the alienation and trauma of exile. The chapter calls for an appreciation of the zonbi as a popular cultural figure whose inherent ambivalence has allowed Haiti’s writers to embrace the unresolved tensions of the nation’s oft-evoked resilience in the face of seemingly relentless tragedy, both within the island and in its diasporas.

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

This chapter examines René Depestre’s epic poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien. It contextualizes Vodou as a cultural and spiritual lieu de mémoire that was a major turning point leading to the Haitian Revolution. It analyzes the monumental role that the Vodou religion played in creating a sense of collective identity and consciousness that would eventually lead to the Ceremony of Bois Caïman. I argue that Vodou was at the heart of the resistance movement and provided agency for the enslaved. This agency allowed them to question the colonized Christian white god and embrace their own African spirituality. In so doing the enslaved were able to come together to create community and affirm their identity/ies. I then argue that the five sections of the poem depict Vodou as a framework for denouncing racism in the US South, as various lwas travel to Alabama, where lynching was commonplace, to decry the US’s political and religious hypocrisy and to avenge the enslaved and their families in the face of the wickedness and hatred associated with slavery. Depestre decries the hypocrisy of the white god and suggests to readers that the lwas show true humanity.

This chapter argues that twenty-first-century poetry, notably by Port-au-Prince-based poets takes up the vexed theorization of contemporary Haitian public life, deploying and recuperating the centuries-old knowledge of the Vodou lwa Papa Loko and his avatars (the butterfly and the wind). The chapter considers poet and writer James Noël’s challenge to readers of contemporary Haitian poetry to grapple with the troubling quotidian realities of present-day Haitian civil society. In particular, I examine the fugacity of what I refer to as Lokoian ethics as a means of, first, advocating for an ethos of the non-predatory through an ecocritical analysis of the butterfly (in contrast with the dragonfly); and, second, decoupling the binary of staying/leaving, debunking the longstanding debate over whether staying or leaving Haiti is ‘better’ for the country, for one’s family, for one’s own future. In particular, the chapter works with the poetry of James Noël and Lyonel Trouillot, putting them into conversation with poetry by Getro Bernabé, Georges Castera, and Ida Faubert.

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.

In July 2019, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Brooklyn went dark. In 90-degree temperatures, over 55,000 customers in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and Georgetown lost electricity in one of the largest power outages in New York’s history. Con Edison, the city’s power company, admitted that it deliberately disconnected these neighborhoods in order to prevent a widespread loss of power that would affect wealthier, whiter areas of the city. Although Black neighborhoods earn the highest scores in New York City’s heat vulnerability index (a ranking system that takes into account the proportion of green space to developed space, access to air conditioning, and the percentage of people living below poverty levels), they are the first on the line when the city’s infrastructure fails.1 What the index does not take into account, however, are the social and political risks to which these neighborhoods are also exposed during a blackout. After the lights went out, 200 police officers flooded Brooklyn, with the nebulous mandate to preserve order. A week earlier, the US Department of Justice had announced that it would not press charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Now law enforcement roamed the streets of Canarsie, policing Black children for splashing water in 90-degree heat.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

This chapter examines the role of competition in Rara celebrations in Haiti. Rara, a Lenten religious festival that features marching bands and Vodou rituals, has a complex relationship with competition, which is unpacked in this chapter. As is argued, by investigating conflict and cooperation as dimensions of competition, it is possible to understand how Haitians navigate the complex social terrain of Rara using both confrontational and collaborative techniques.

Another indicator of oppositional consciousness and racial solidarity were the connections between enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color during revolts and ritual gatherings that helped the beginnings of the Revolution. The Bwa Kayman ceremony spiritually solidified alliances between West Central Africans and Bight of Benin Africans; and the struggle of the formerly enslaved rebels and maroons propelled racial solidarity between Africans, creoles, and free people of color. I recount mobilizations that occurred in Saint Domingue’s northern, western, and southern departments, and attempt to identify patterns of racial, gender, and labor politics that would inform post-independence social, economic, religious, and political formations. The first post-independence Constitution declared “the Haitians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks,” making Haiti the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas.

Another indicator of oppositional consciousness and racial solidarity were the connections between enslaved people, maroons, and free people of color during revolts and ritual gatherings that helped the beginnings of the Revolution. The Bwa Kayman ceremony spiritually solidified alliances between West Central Africans and Bight of Benin Africans; and the struggle of the formerly enslaved rebels and maroons propelled racial solidarity between Africans, creoles, and free people of color. I recount mobilizations that occurred in Saint Domingue’s northern, western, and southern departments, and attempt to identify patterns of racial, gender, and labor politics that would inform post-independence social, economic, religious, and political formations. The first post-independence Constitution declared “the Haitians shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks,” making Haiti the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas.

This essay follows in the footsteps of two women, Cecile Fatiman and Petra Carabalí, to explore the convergence between sacred space, embodied archives, and slave insurgent movements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cecile Fatiman was the mambo, or Vodun priestess, who famously presided over the Bois-Caiman ceremony that ignited the Haitian Revolution. Though relatively unknown to historians, Petra Carabalí helped to produce a momentous ritual that erupted during the 1844 slave movement in Cuba. Cecile and Petra’s stories demonstrate that enslaved women were critical participants in several important rituals that became catalysts for organized rebellion. This chapter examines the gendered politics of these ritual spaces and the role of sacred dance in producing a larger insurgent culture. It demonstrates the ways in which ritual activities enabled enslaved people to nourish organic political cultures, reclaim violated bodies, and engage a larger Atlantic ethos of freedom. Ultimately, it uses ritual space and sacred dance as alternative archives to reconceptualize how enslaved people imagined, enacted, and lived their freedom.